HMRC Awards £657 Million in Low-Code Software Contracts to Atos, Cognizant and Coforge
UK Tax Authority Awards £657M in Low-Code Contracts to Atos, Cognizant, and Coforge
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the UK tax collector that brought in £938.8 billion during the latest reported financial year, has awarded three major contracts worth up to £657 million for low-code software development and support. The procurement actions dispel the assumption that empowering users with visual, low-code tooling automatically reduces enterprise engineering costs.
The Tech TL;DR:
- The Core Investment: HMRC committed up to £657 million across three distinct low-code packages to streamline software delivery.
- The Enterprise Vendors: French consultancy Atos secured a £78.2 million leadership deal, while Cognizant and Coforge won £360 million and £219 million build packages respectively.
- The Technical Stack: The Digital and Legacy Application Services (DALAS) framework supports enterprise platforms including Pega, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics, and Power Platform.
Breaking Down the DALAS Framework Lots and Vendor Responsibilities
The procurement is structured under Lot 4a, the multi-product configuration section of HMRC’s Digital and Legacy Application Services (DALAS) framework. Lot 4a was originally estimated to be worth £700 million, while a later award notice assigned a combined estimated value of £2.8 billion to the second phase of DALAS, covering framework Lots 1, 4a, and 4b. These figures sit beneath a wider DALAS framework valuation initially pegged at up to £4.5 billion as the government attempts to wrestle stubborn legacy architectures under control.
French consultancy and outsourcer Atos secured Lot 3, a £78.2 million deal for specialist low-code leadership services. According to procurement documentation, Atos will supply programme oversight, supplier management, governance, assurance, and delivery support for the agency’s low-code technology estate. The initial term spans three years, with two optional one-year extensions available.
Meanwhile, Cognizant and Indian tech services company Coforge secured the remaining work packages under the low-code call-off. Cognizant won a £360 million contract designated as Lot 1, while Coforge captured a £219 million deal under Lot 2. Both contracts carry the same three-year initial term and dual one-year extension options as the Atos agreement. Cognizant and Coforge are tasked with delivering specialist low-code build, configuration, DevOps, and live service management services, spanning the design, development, testing, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement of low-code products.
Addressing Legacy Debt and Deployment Realities
Last year, the National Audit Office (NAO), a spending watchdog, published an assessment stating that remediating legacy systems is taking HMRC longer than expected and running over budget.
Technical Implementation: Managing Low-Code Configuration Pipelines
curl -X GET "https://api.internal-tax-estate.gov/healthz"
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ENV_DEPLOY_TOKEN"
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
The Architectural Outlook
The scale of the HMRC awards highlights a hard operational truth: low-code does not mean low-overhead.